Archive for March, 2013

DH is currently working interstate for a month. Despite being in the IT industry, working remotely does not happen very much in his work. Who’da thunk it?

So…. being a homeschooling family and all, we are spending four weeks in a unit in the National Capital.

This has many wonderful perks to it, especially when we have a daily food and expenses budget. (I am impressed. Years ago, even ‘though the budget was the same, it was tough to stay within it. Now, with five of us, not only does it significantly aid the supermarket budget, but it also lets us eat out fairly often. I must have learnt some housekeeping skills along the way!) There are so many museums and attractions to enjoy, as well as lots of outdoor space.

Internet access is not one of the perks.

We can have internet access for $10- per day. Yup. That’s right. $10- per DAY. Which makes it approximately $300- for our time down here. We do need some internet for DH’s work and for Possum’s schooling, but we are trying to just do it in spurts as much as possible.

This is not good news for blogging.

It should be fine. I love Microsoft’s Live Writer. This is what I use at home. It does have some flaws, ‘though.

It does not have an android equivalent, not that typing on my tablet is my preferred way of going

It does not have a Windows 8 equivalent, which means that we cannot load it on the “school laptop” (our newest baby)

It does nasty things on DH’s laptop, apparently. Well, not Live Writer itself, I don’t think, but all the other stuff that it now downloads with it. Remember all those missing posts from January 2012?

So that means, no LiveWriter. No blogging offline. No easy posting of pics. (Oh, and just to make it even more fun, we do not have Office on the school laptop, and I can’t cut and paste on the tablet, so writing in another programme and copying it over is pretty tough going, too.)

What a nuisance.

Hopefully I will be able to keep you up to date with all our exciting happenings in SOME way. Hopefully.

One of the tricky things I am finding with homeschooling is to fit in all the “extra” subjects. You know, anything that isn’t one of the Three Rs. It seems, in an attempt to keep up with (or ahead of, because there is always the extra pressure when homeschooling) the best students in our local schools, I am unintentionally NAPLANing Possum.

For example, we are currently working on a Reading Recovery Level of 16. Compared to our local schools, this is a bit slow. Of course, nationally, this is about a year ahead of where the average lies.

Realising this, and realising that Possum was not having as much fun learning as either of us would like, I have decided to take a step back and put a big effort in to getting the other subjects covered.

Our main “curriculum” (not that we are covering it to the letter) is Mater Amabilis. I love the way it is done. It works with our interests, pushes us just enough in the other areas and allows room for Possum to keep working ahead in Maths if he likes. It is also quite easy to “Australianise”.

In Level 1B (equivalent to our Year 1), the main Earth Science focus is on water. Specifically, right now, we are looking at waterways. As a part of this, we need to choose “our waterway”, which is the one that we will use as our study focus and visit eight times during the year.

Today we made our initial visit.

We sat with our eyes closed to listen and smell and feel the air. We looked. We discussed who uses the river just there and how. We recorded various observations and sketched interesting things.

And two of the three kids ended up in the river.

(This lead to the observation that the wet moss on the rocks was slippery. It also lead to tears and extra washing for me.)

I mustn’t have been too surprised. After all, I did have a towel in my bag.

Do you remember how much fun field trips were as a school student? I can only imagine how NOT fun they must have been for the adults. The constant worry of losing kids, the noise and chaos, shushing kids when tour guides spoke, slowing kids down, hurrying kids up – it had to feel like herding geese. Home schooling field trips seem to be a little more relaxed for us as teachers and parents.

and:

Can you imagine taking a group of kids to the ocean for the day as a field trip?

Hmm. I can imagine. Do you think there is a reason why my kids still haven’t been taken to the fantastic tidal pools on the rock platform at one of our (relatively) local beaches?